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New Apps Connect to Friends Nearby

The Highlight app map page on iPhone shows the location of the founder, Paul Davison.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Smartphones have become indispensable for some people to find nearby cool new places for a bite or a drink.

Social networks like Facebook help those people connect with friends and colleagues.

What if those two features were merged into one service — to find friends, and friends of friends, whenever they were nearby? Is that unnerving? Or is it terribly beneficial?

Many companies say it is beneficial and that their apps will help people forge new connections and meet someone they perhaps should know. App stores have been flooded with such tools in recent weeks. Kismet, Glancee, Highlight, Ban.jo, Meeteor, Pearescope, GetGauss, Intro, Qrious, Mingle and Sonar, hope to transform the smartphone into a social dowsing rod that delivers an alert when it detects other people nearby who share interests, friends or career goals.

Many of these services made their debuts or released fresh versions right before the opening on Friday of South by Southwest, the technology, music and film conference in Austin, Tex.

They want to catch the eye, and thumbs, of the throngs of technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who flock there to see the latest in start-ups and innovative ideas. What they really want is for that concentrated crowd of early adopters to return home and influence everyone else to use their apps. That strategy worked for Twitter and Foursquare, after all.

“When Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare first came out, people looked at it and said: ‘Ugh, it’s creepy. Why would I do that?’ ” said Paul Davison, the chief executive and founder of one such service, called Highlight. “But with any new technology, especially one around sharing, that is always going to happen and over time, this could become a mainstream service, just like those other ones did.”

Mingle, for example, is still in its infancy. Andy Kim, one of its founders, said the service, which was released late last year, has had roughly 50,000 downloads, which seems like a paltry sum when compared with a more established location-based application like Foursquare, which claims 15 million active users.

Photo

Michelle Norgan and Kevin Stephens created Kismet, an app that lets users meet people in specific settings.Credit
Ben Sklar for The New York Times

Mr. Kim said his company, and the others like it, are carving out a new niche in social media by following the paths forged by Twitter, with its micromessaging service; GroupMe, with its group-chat application; and Foursquare, with the check-in service. Many naysayers denounced those services as fads when they were introduced.

It might be easier for the new generation of services to gain a following, largely because most of them are dependent on the plumbing that is already in place, Facebook. After an app is downloaded to a smartphone, it typically connects to Facebook to pull in address book and personal information. The user must give it permission to do this.

The apps run quietly in the background of the phone and wait for someone else using the service to wander by. Because the app knows the locations of all its users, the software can notify people who are close by. It then checks for commonalities, like a love of Quentin Tarantino films or hidden social connections, like sharing a group of friends.

Some apps, like Highlight, even allow people to “bookmark” people they enjoyed meeting and will remind them of that interaction the next time they cross paths, even if it is a year later, in a restaurant across the country.

“We now have an architecture built around the Web that allows for a new kind of services,” Mr. Davison said. Facebook and Twitter have become ubiquitous, he said, as has the presence of always-on, location-aware smartphones that work in tandem to “create a sixth sense that surfaces data and information that already exists around you.”

But these services raise the question: do people really want to be stalked or want strangers introducing themselves on the street? The creators of these services say yes, that while the proliferation of the cellphone has made it harder to strike up a conversation with another lonely drinker or solo commuter, the apps may make it easier to talk.

“You can’t go into a coffee shop without seeing people staring at their phones,” said Michelle Norgan, one of the founders of Kismet. “The phone is the new icebreaker and these apps remind you that there are people nearby to interact with, that you have friends and things in common with them. It is a push to get people to get their heads out of their phones and back into that one-on-one.”

Privacy is an even larger issue. Several other apps, most notably Color, that have tried to sell users on sharing their photos and information with those nearby have met resistance and even ridicule. But the developers of those apps say they take precautions, like making sure that contact and location information is concealed until two parties agree to be connected.

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Paul Davison founded Highlight, another app that connects people.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Another concern: use of batteries and data, precious commodities among smartphone owners. Because applications that run in the background, constantly checking location, can deplete both quickly, the makers of these apps must make sure they do not drain either to function.

With at least a dozen services in this genre alone, attracting attention at the South by Southwest conference will not be easy.

“We are definitely stepping on each other’s feet in terms of features and value propositions,” said Andrea Vaccari, the founder of Glancee. “The winner will be cemented over the next few weeks, and this is a winner-takes-all space, like Facebook.”

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And of course, attracting buzz and momentum at South by Southwest, a festival where people are more technology knowledgeable than most, does not guarantee success in the real world, where everyone does not have an iPhone and is not yet sold on the promise of an always-on, always-connected future.

But investors already seem sold on the latest mobile craze. Kismet recently raised $1 million in seed financing from notable venture capital firms, including Triple Point Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Mingle raised $125,000 in seed financing from angel investors and Highlight raised money from the esteemed venture capital firm Benchmark Capital and from Charlie Cheever, formerly of Facebook and a co-founder of Quora.

Most of the applications are available free and for iPhone and Android devices. The entrepreneurs behind them say they hope that significant value can be derived from location-based services that know where their users go, events they are interested in and the kinds of people they want to meet.

For example, marketers and recruiters might pay for access to a tool that tells them whom they should speak with at a networking event. Advertisers might also be interested in sending specifically tailored messages to users who have signed up for these services when they walk into their store.

There is always the chance that these services, which sound a little like dating services, will be used as such. But Mr. Davison says that is to be expected.

“Any social site that can be used for flirting will be,” he said. “But this is much bigger than that. You’ll be able to walk into a room, look around you, and know everyone’s name and everything about them. It can make profound, new things happen.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 9, 2012, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Apps Connect to Friends Nearby. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe